1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to interaction using mobile devices; and, more particularly, to sharing of messages sent from a mobile device.
2. Related Art
Cell (mobile) phones are widely used as mobile devices to communicate anywhere in the world. Some of them are very simple devices capable of voice communication alone. Many other today's mobile devices are used for multiple purposes, other than voice communication, in any convenient location.
They keep record of appointments and schedules, store addresses, present calendars, surf Internet, play games among many other purposes. They are capable of playing music and other audio clips, and also play video clips and movies. They can be networked with external devices such as other mobile phones, laptops and personal computers and modems via infrared, Bluetooth and WIFI (802.11 variations) interfaces. This enormously increases their functionality when compared to just few years ago.
Today's mobile devices have some processing ability and are capable of accomplishing some tasks that were usually meant for personal computer alone. However, using emails to send information from one person to another with text seems inconvenient on mobile devices with small barely useable keyboards. In addition, sending SMS is not typically easy in languages that require use of over 30 characters in their alphabets. New forms of interactions available for PCs and laptops have not really made a move to mobile devices. In particular, some social networks such as Facebook have created a mobile app version for mobile devices. However, such apps are of limited functionality. In addition, a user's control over how his messages are displayed is limited, and not easily configurable from the mobile device.
Some software vendors such as WordPress have provided blogging features to PC and laptop based users. Blogging requires a lot of technical knowledge, especially if one has to add photos and videos to one's blog. In addition, to do anything useful, one has to learn to program in PHP or some such computer programming language or a web-based programming language—which is a deterrent to most non-technical users. There are no convenient blogging tools for mobile users. There are none that support automatically incorporating audio recorded on mobile into a blog post. It is very inconvenient and time consuming to incorporate audio, especially one recorded by a user, into a blog post. There are no known tools today that support automatic incorporation of a photo taken by a user, and voice recorded by a user, into an online blog page. These are major headaches of blogging and need to be addressed such that even the semi-literate and children can use blogging features, especially from mobile devices. The present invention address these issues.
One major need in the market is to have a shared blogging facility for groups of people who work together, such as in a project. Businesses need them, for example, to gather field level observations from people working in the field. Security of such field gathered information is a big concern too. There are no tools available today to support that, and the simple blogging tools available today are not easy to use or convenient to use for a group. There are no tools available today where users can share audio messages with each other. There are no tools available today where users can easily or automatically share a combination of video components, textual components, audio components, images from their messages with each other, either in a blog post or in a mobile messaging system.
These and other limitations and deficiencies associated with the related art may be more fully appreciated by those skilled in the art after comparing such related art with various aspects of the present invention as set forth herein with reference to the figures.